Documents Tagged carbon offsets in All Sections

Having a strong, credible, and transparent system for tracking greenhouse gas emissions and the actions of a country is an essential building block of an effective international system to address global warming. This was a key issue at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 as it was agreement on the elements of the transparency and accountability in the final hours that enabled the full package to be agreed upon by key countries. Resolving important details about how these pieces would be implemented has been a central part of the ongoing global warming negotiations. Advancing progress toward robust measurement, reporting, and verification systems is an imperative for the Cancun Climate Summit.

Reducing overall domestic emissions at least 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and at least 80 percent by 2050 will require emissions reductions not only from large stationary sources of global warming pollution such as power plants, industrial
facilities, and fuel refineries, but also from those sources that are individually too small or dispersed to include under the cap, such as agricultural emissions from the use of nitrogen fertilizers. Similarly, there are means for sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2)—that is, absorbing it out of the atmosphere and storing it safely—in carbon “sinks” such as soils and forests that are difficult to account for under a cap. The United States must adopt alternative mechanisms such as mandatory policies, incentives, and domestic and international offsets to drive emissions reductions and carbon sequestration in these “uncapped sectors” both domestically and abroad. Get document in pdf.

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